 Hello and welcome to theCUBE's special presentation with Horizon3.ai and with Rainer Richter, Vice President of EMEA, Europe, Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific, APAC, Horizon3.ai. Welcome to this special CUBE presentation. Thanks for joining us. Thank you for the invitation. So Horizon3.ai driving global expansion, big international news with a partner-first approach. You guys are expanding internationally. Let's get into it. You guys are driving this new expanse partner program to new heights. Tell us about it. What are you seeing in the momentum? Why the expansion? What's all the news about? Well, I would say in international, we have, I would say a similar situation like in the US, there is a global shortage of well-educated penetration testers on the one hand side. On the other side, we have a raising demand of network and infrastructure security. And with our approach of an autonomous penetration testing, I believe we are totally on top of the game, especially as we have also now starting with an international instance. That means, for example, if a customer in Europe is using our service NodeZero, he will be connected to a NodeZero instance which is located inside the European Union. And therefore he doesn't have to worry about the conflict between the European GDPR regulations versus the US Cloud Act. And I would say there we have a total good package for our partners that they can provide differentiators to their customers. You know, we've had great conversations here on theCUBE with the CEO and the founders of the company around the leverage of the cloud and how successful that's been for the company. And obviously I can just connect the dots here, but I'd like you to weigh in more on how that translates into the go-to-market here because you got great cloud-scale with the security product you guys are having success with, great leverage there. I've seen a lot of success there. What's the momentum on the channel partner program internationally? Why is it so important to you? Is it just the regional segmentation? Is it the economics? Why the momentum? Well, there are multiple issues. First of all, there is a raising demand in penetration testing. And don't forget that in international we have a much higher level in number or percentage in SMB and mid-market customers. So these customers typically, most of them even didn't have a pen test done once a year. So for them, pen testing was just too expensive. Now with our offering, together with our partners we can provide different ways how customers could get an autonomous pen testing done more than once a year with even lower costs than they had with a traditional manual pen test. So and that is because we have our consulting plus package which is for typically pen testers. They can go out and can do a much faster, much quicker and they're a pen test at many customers once after each other. So they can do more pen tests on a lower, more attractive price. On the other side, there are others or even the same one who are providing no zero as an MSSP service. So they can go after SMB customers saying, okay, you only have a couple of hundred IP addresses. No worries, we have the perfect package for you. And then you have, let's say the mid-market, let's say there's a thousand and more employees then they might even have an annual subscription very traditional. But for all of them, it's all the same. The customer or the service provider doesn't need a piece of hardware. They only need to install a small piece of a Docker container and that's it. And that makes it so smooth to go in and say, okay, Mr. Customer, we just put in this virtual attacker into your network and that's it and all the rest is done. And within three clicks, they can act like a pen tester with a 20 years of experience. And that's going to be very channel friendly and partner friendly. I can almost imagine. So I have to ask you, and thank you for calling out that breakdown and segmentation that was very helpful for me to understand. But I want to follow up if you don't mind, what type of partners are you seeing the most traction with and why? Well, I would say at the beginning, typically you have the innovators, the early adapters typically boutique size of partners, they start because they are always looking for innovation. Those are the ones they start in the beginning. So we have a right range of partners having mostly even managed by the owner of the company. So they immediately understand, okay, there is the value and they can change their offering. They're changing the offering in terms of penetration testing because they can do more pen tests and they can then add others ones. Or we have those ones who offered pen test services but they did not have their own pen testers. So they had to go out on the open market and source pen testing experts to get the pen test at a particular customer done. And now with node zero, they are totally independent. They can go out and say, okay, Mr. Customer, here's the service, that's it. We turn it on and within an hour you're up and running totally. And those pen tests are usually expensive and hard to do. Now it's right in line with the sales delivery. Pretty interesting for a partner. Absolutely, but on the other hand side, we are not killing the pen testers business. We do something, we're providing with node zeroes. I would call something like the foundational work. The foundational work of having an ongoing penetration testing of the infrastructure, the operating system and the pen testers by themselves, they can concentrate in the future on things like application pen testing, for example. So those services, which we're not touching. So we are not killing the pen test the market. We're just taking away the ongoing, let's say, foundation work, call it that way. Yeah, yeah, that was one of my questions I was going to ask is there's a lot of interest in this autonomous pen testing. One, because it's expensive to do because those skills are required are in need and they're expensive. So you kind of cover the entry level and the blockers that are in there. I've seen people say to me, this pen test becomes a blocker for getting things done. So there's been a lot of interest in the autonomous pen testing for organizations to have that posture. And it's an overseas issue too because now you have that ongoing thing. So can you explain that particular benefit for an organization to have that continuously verifying an organization's posture? Certainly. So I would say typically you have to do your patches. You have to bring in new versions of operating systems, of different services, of operating systems of some components and they are always bringing new vulnerabilities. The difference here is that with node zero, we are telling the customer or the partner package. We're telling them which are the executable vulnerabilities because previously they might have had a vulnerability scanner. So this vulnerability scanner brought up hundreds or even thousands of CVEs, but didn't say anything about which of them are vulnerable, really executable. And then you need an expert digging in one CVE after the other finding out is it really executable? Yes or no. And that is where you need highly paid experts, which we have a shortage. So with nodes zero now, we can say, okay, we tell you exactly which ones are the ones you should work on because those are the ones which are executable. We rank them accordingly to the risk level, how easily they can be used and by a sudden and then the good thing is converted or in difference to the traditional penetration test. They don't have to wait for a year for the next pain test to find out if the fixing was effective. They run just the next scan and say, yes, closed. Vulnerability is gone. The time is really valuable. And if you're doing any DevOps cloud native, you're always pushing new things. So pen test ongoing pen testing is actually a benefit just in general as a kind of hygiene. So really, really interesting solution and really bring that global scale is going to be a new coverage area for us for sure. I have to ask you if you don't mind answering what particular region are you focused on or plan to target for this next phase of growth? Well, at this moment, we are concentrating on the countries inside the European Union plus the United Kingdom. And they, of course, logically, I'm based in the Frankfurt area that means we cover more or less the country's chest around. So it's like the so-called Dach region, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, plus the Netherlands. But we also already have partners in the Nordics like in Finland, when Sweden. So it's rapidly, we have partners already in the UK and it's rapidly growing. So for example, we are now starting with some activities in Singapore and also in the Middle East area. Very important, depending on, let's say, the way how to do business currently, we try to concentrate on those countries where we can have, let's say, at least English as an accepted business language. Great, is there any particular region you're having the most success with right now? Is it sounds like European Union's kind of first wave? What's the... That's the first, definitely. That's the first wave. And now we're also getting the European instance up and running. It's clearly our commitment also to the marketing. Okay, we know there are certain dedicated requirements and we take care of this and we're just launching, we're building up this one, the instance in the AWS service center here in Frankfurt, also with some dedicated hardware and a data center in Frankfurt, where we have with the data, by the way, the highest internet interconnection bandwidth on the planet. So we have very short latency to wherever you are on the globe. That's a great call-out to benefit too. I was going to ask that. What are some of the benefits your partners are seeing in EMEA and Asia Pacific? Well, I would say the benefits for them, it's clearly they can talk with customers and can offer customers penetration testing, which they before even didn't think about because penetration testing in a traditional way was simply too expensive for them, too complex. The preparation time was too long. They didn't even have the capacity to support an external pain tester. Now with this service, you can go in and say, even say, Mr. Customer, we can do a test with you in a couple of minutes. Within, we have installed the Docker container. Within 10 minutes, we have the pain test started. That's it. And then we just wait. And I would say that is we are seeing so many aha moments then on the partner side when they see node zero the first time working. It's like, wow, that is great. And then they walk out to customers and show it to their typically most at the beginning, mostly the friendly customers like, wow, that's great. I need that. And I would say the feedback from the partners is, that is a service where I do not have to evangelize the customer. Everybody understands penetration testing. I don't have to say, describe what it is. They understand the customer, understanding immediately. Yes, penetration testing heard about it. I know I should do it, but too complex, too expensive. Now with the name is, for example, is an MSSP service provided from one of our partners, but it's getting easy. And it's great, great benefit there. I mean, I gotta say, I'm a huge fan of what you guys are doing. I like this continuous automation. That's a major benefit. If anyone doing DevOps or any kind of modern application development, this is just a godsend for them. This is really good. And like you said, the pen testers that are doing it, they were kind of coming down from their expertise to kind of do things that should have been automated. They get to focus on the bigger ticket items. That's a really big point. So we free them, we free the pen testers for the higher level elements of the penetration testing segment that is typically than the application testing, which is currently far away from being automated. Yeah, and that's where the most critical workloads are. And I think this is the nice balance. Congratulations on the international expansion of the program. And thanks for coming on this special presentation. I really appreciate it. Thank you. You're welcome. This is theCUBE's special presentation. You know, checking out pen test, automation, international expansion, horizon3.ai, really innovative solution. In our next segment, Chris Hill, Sector Head for Strategic Accounts will discuss the power of horizon3.ai and Splunk in action. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.